Divine Inspiration...
It's the vital ingredient of creativity, but what exactly is this thing called inspiration?
Psychoanalyst Adam Phillips seeks its source while diverse artists from all fields reveal how the muse strikes them ... from poet Andrew Motion and his 'ritual pencil', to singer Beth Orton and her big pink hat
Waiting for inspiration ... Adam Phillips
Photograph: Andy Hall
If the word "inspiration" is to have any meaning,' TS Eliot wrote, 'it must mean just this, the speaker or writer is uttering something that he does not wholly understand - or which he may even misinterpret when the inspiration has departed from him.'
Eliot has a slight doubt about whether the word has any meaning, or any meaning now, because inspiration is something that only originally made sense in a religious context.
If you are a religious believer, of any denomination, you know, or at least you have words for, where your inspiration comes from, however mysterious it may seem; and you may even have an idea about what you can do to invoke it - make sacrifices, do ritual incantations, live ascetically, take drugs, sit at your desk at the same time every morning, and so on.
For the more secular-minded, there is not much language to talk about inspiration without beginning to sound a bit mystical, reliant on some powerful source or force that can't quite be named but can't quite be ignored.
Yet inspiration is a word no one is shy of using, even though they are not that keen to explain how it might work.
It is the kind of magic people like to believe in, perhaps especially now, in a culture where money can buy virtually everything else of value, and science and technology can create or invent the things we most need.
Inspiration, in other words, is a kind of God-term; it refers to something we think of as essential, but that we can't, or may not want to, understand.
As Eliot suggests, it is like a visitation from something profound and incomprehensible.
It reassures us, or at least reminds us, some of the best things about us are beyond our control.
Whatever it is that feeds us our best lines - the gods or God, the unconscious or the genes, the class war, etc. - it is something we depend on but cannot command.
Like God's grace, inspiration doesn't respond to our need or our greed for it.
It is not a resource we can exploit; and it doesn't look as if, at least as yet, science or technology can help us get more of it.
It isn't exactly measureable.
It may be this, perhaps more than anything else, that makes inspiration so difficult to describe in its workings, and so enraging in its elusiveness.
In our craving for something we can't count on, we, often unwittingly, do anything we can to destroy it.
Inspiration may not belong to us, but it is only we who can be inspired.
By the same token it is only we who can spoil it.
It is not news, even though it is continually shocking to see, just how much envy insidiously corrodes our pleasure in other people's gifts and talents.
What is more difficult to apprehend is just how fearful people often are of their own inspiration, of their own odd and unfounded thoughts, and therefore, how prone they are to sabotage it and attack it and trivialize it.
Often just by ignoring it.
If to be inspired means, as Eliot said, to be even momentarily unintelligible, unrecognizable to oneself, then inspiration is akin to possession, to being taken over.
This, for some reason worth considering, does not come naturally to most people.
However much we want inspiration, if it disturbs our normal sense of ourselves then we are going to resist it.
Most people are not seeking self-knowledge; they believe - they live as if - they already know who they are.
Self-knowledge, in this sense, is the enemy of inspiration, our best defense against this alien invasion.
As in sex, we may long to lose our composure and self-control, but there is one thing we desire even more, and that is... not to.
Self-knowledge protects us from inspiration; inspiration, like sexual desire, undoes us.
For non-believers, inspiration is more like sexual desire than anything else; a fascination, a fear, and something we think of as having a secret, solitary pleasure attached to it.
When people fear domesticity, or a regular job or even therapy will destroy their creativity, it is usually because they have an apprehension something about themselves is already sabotaging their inspiration, this is then attributed, delegated, to the family, or the work routine, or the therapist.
Of course, making anything depends on taking the time and creating the best conditions for the work; indeed, actively creating the worst possible conditions for one's work is one of the commonest ways people have of sabotaging their inspiration.
It is also true, as anyone knows who has let themselves rely on their inspiration as well as their discipline, it is willing what cannot be willed to believe you can make an appointment with your inspiration.
Without practice no one can play a musical instrument, but practice at best creates the conditions in which inspiration can happen; no amount of practice creates or guarantees the inspiration.
If a true poet, as poet Randall Jarrell once said, is someone struck by lightning several times, the only thing a poet can do is make sure he keeps going out.
The whole notion of inspiration, in this sense, shows us both the limits and necessities of our working practices.
You can work at your poetry, but you can't work at your inspiration.
Self-discipline exposes what the self can't be disciplined to do.
We have glamorized inspiration, idealized the artist possessed by vision to protect ourselves from two simple and apparently contradictory acknowledgments.
Firstly, as Eliot among many others attests, inspiration can be extremely disturbing; it can leave us confounded, at odds with ourselves, bemused by the kinds of things we find ourselves making.
Secondly, there is a strange and unsettling ease about inspired work because it comes unbidden; it may require disciplined attention, but not effort, concentration, not diligence.
Just as you can't try and have a dream, or decide beforehand what it will be, inspired work, whatever its prehistory of crisis or trauma, can seem to just happen.
When Keats wrote poetry must come as easily as leaves to a tree, or Picasso said, 'I don't seek, I find', they were both, as post-Romantic artists, reminding us, and presumably themselves, inspiration is beyond the realm of calculated intentions.
It happens unannounced, more like bursting out laughing, or making a Freudian slip, than a quest or an ordeal.
It is an affront to our guilty selves for good things to come easily; and it is an affront to our sovereign selves good things might come in spite of us, not because of us.
That what matters most to us is quite beyond us.
One of the ways we recognize what we think of as inspired works of art - as opposed to pieces of information, or propaganda or advertising - is, they seem to have an unknowable provenance; we can't imagine where Shakespeare's plays, or Mozart's music, or Emily Dickinson's poems could have come from.
Or how it would feel to be the kinds of people who did such things.
By the same token, inspired work tends to have a wildly unpredictable effect; Nazis, and nice people, can be lovers of Goethe, the gospels can both brutalize people and make them astoundingly loving.
When we say inspired work inspires us, we mean, usually, we are surprised by the effect it has on us.
After it, we have thoughts and feelings we did not know we were capable of, and we may not entirely understand nor be able to give a plausible account of.
To talk about inspiration now is to talk about the fact we still don't know where many of the best things about us come from, many of them may not be teachable, and we can't always recognize them - or rather, say what we recognize - when they turn up.
When we are inspired, rather like when we are in love, we can feel both unintelligible to ourselves and most truly ourselves (ie. at our best).
Inspired art isn't instrumental, isn't the means to an obvious end; it tells us neither what we should do with it nor what we should make of it.
The whole notion of inspiration, perhaps now more than ever, raises two interesting issues.
Firstly, it makes us wonder why being unrecognizable to ourselves, finding ourselves surprising, or shocking, or bizarre, should be at once so disturbing and so attractive (and in some religions, so taboo).
Secondly, why depending upon something (or someone) - realizing how little of what we need we can provide for ourselves - so often brings out the worst in us.
We need to be receptive to the unfamiliar; and we need to be able to wait, without certainty, for the thing we want.
This, in a sense, is the faith of the believer in artistic inspiration.
It is, perhaps, not surprising the wish to fake it or the wish to dispense with it altogether is so pervasive.
It is difficult to get our minds around something so unlike a commodity, and, in actuality, so unlike a religion.
There are, of course, superstitions around inspiration, and probably all artists have their own; but there are no dogmas about inspiration, except it is required for work of the highest value.
There are no laws, natural or otherwise, of inspiration, except the ironic law, it is mostly unpredictable.
There are no experts who can teach it, though there are people who can teach us how to recognize it.
It is, after all, only by consensus we agree to recognize certain artworks and certain people as inspired in the first place.
If the word inspiration is to have any meaning it has to have people who will give it meaning; people who, for various reasons, want to believe in it, and want to get other people to take it seriously.
Yet, like all God-terms, it is open to interpretation, and needs to be because terrible things are also done in its name.
We may want to think well of artistic inspiration, but we need to be able to consider our options.
It would be possible, for example, to imagine a society that thought the whole notion of inspiration was the invention of irresponsible, decadent people who simply needed to disown what they did, people who refused to take the consequences of their actions; people who were always saying, one way or another, 'it wasn't really me'.
From this point of view, inspiration would just be bad faith, the alibi of the timid, of those who couldn't bear their own nature (and above all couldn't bear the fact it was their nature not to understand themselves).
These hardliners would want us to face up to what we are doing when we vote in democracies for leaders who have a 'calling', or when we exempt so-called artists from ordinary moral standards, or even admire their terrible behavior.
They would tell us that when we do these things we are worshipping at the shrine of inspiration; they would tell us heeding the call of 'higher powers' can be the most compelling cover story for the most brutal egotism.
At its most minimal, they would say, to describe ourselves as living in the lap of the gods tends to be a mixed blessing.
That we should see our invention of gods as our intolerance of being human: and our wish to be the chosen ones as our self-cure for our insignificance in the scheme of things.
It is worth wondering, they might say, why we are learning belatedly to be wary of inspired world leaders but not of inspired artists.
Even though artists are far more harmless than politicians or businessmen, we need to be able to distinguish now between different kinds of inspiration.
The version of inspiration we should trust tends to be enigmatic and disturbing to the person inspired; they don't, as Eliot said, really understand it.
It should not be an incitement, however plausibly put, to harm other people.
It should not be permission, or instruction, to do terrible things so much as the offering up of something new for consideration.
In other words, the inspired don't use the word inspiration to covertly legitimize his own private dogmas and interests, or to allow himself to claim he knows what he is doing, and what he is doing is right.
Bad inspiration always wants to convert people, good inspiration merely wants to interest them.
Our inspiration can't tell us what our inspiration is worth.
Only we can.
When inspiration is recruited as part of our craving for authority - for the authoritative voice either inside us or outside us - we need to be suspicious.
When it is used to refer to our potential for strange thoughts and feelings it reminds us of our unfathomable resources.
Inspiration makes us choose, it doesn't do our choosing for us.
We still have to work out, among the many things, written and said, which are the ones that matter to us, and which are the ones that should matter to us: which are the ones that will give us the lives that we want.
Good inspiration draws things to our attention.
For believers and non-believers alike, that should be more than enough.
· Adam Phillips is a psychoanalyst and writer.
His most recent books, Going Sane, and Freud Reader, are published by Penguin in paperback this month.
'Lounging in my underwear inspires me'
Martha WainwrightMusician
Maybe it's because I'm still in the selfish period of my life - I don't have children and I'm not married - that I do a lot of navel-gazing.
What really gets me to pick up the guitar are my feelings of sadness, loneliness, fear and desperation.
I find when I'm writing that I start to cry.
Sometimes it gets too 'woe is me' and that's uninteresting, but usually it's a very genuine emotion.
I was writing a happy song the other day with an uplifting beat and the lyrics 'You've got me moving, you've got me grooving'.
Now it's changed to 'I cannot move, I cannot groove'.
When you're as self-obsessed as I am, it's good to listen to other types of music.
I get inspired by Arabic wails and chords and scales from different parts of the world.
Dancing is good too, or else just pacing and talking to myself.
When I'm not on the road, I spend a lot of time sitting around in my apartment in my underwear.
And though it may sound very egotistical, I find it helpful to look at myself in the mirror.
It gives you a kind of perspective.
I got my first real burst of inspiration after my father had a child with someone other than my mother, and I found out they weren't going to stay together.
Suddenly life had become larger and more complicated, but in a positive way, because now there was something to talk about.
That was when I wrote my first song.
Pawel PawlikowskiFilm director
When I was younger and more of a documentary film-maker, I spent a lot of time roaming the world looking for things to inspire me, but now I'm making feature films, inspiration seems to happen behind my desk or in the bathtub.
I'll read a poem or pick up a novel like Crime and Punishment, or watch a film to remind me what cinema should be - Ashes and Diamonds, or Badlands, or Amarcord.
One thing you develop with age and experience is an intuition for a good idea: something strikes a chord with you and it resonates.
At any given time I'll have four or five ideas, usually half-baked, but I'll juggle them around and write story outlines until one of them stands out.
Inspiration is an inchoate process that cannot really be legislated.
For that reason, I find starting with some didactic theory doesn't work.
Political anger can spark you, but it rarely gets you very far.
My favourite of the films I've made, Serbian Epics, was the result of an unanswered question dealing with a particularly complicated and ambiguous political situation, but it was a very personal film.
I think it conveyed the multi-layered nature of the situation, rather than simply explaining it and thereby reducing it to something partial and limited.
Filmmaking is the most annoyingly complicated and diffusive process and lots of people are involved, so it had better be a strong impulse that pushes you to do it.
I've made films where the ideas have carried me through, and it's like being in love.
I've also made films where they haven't, and it's more like plumbing.
Nick BroomfieldDocumentary filmmaker
Inspiration for me comes out of loneliness and a need to understand the times we live in.
When I made Heidi Fleiss, it was because I was feeling incredibly lonely in Los Angeles and wanted to find a story that would enable me to come to terms with this town which was so unlike anything I had encountered before.
When I'm editing, I like to be a bit removed, out in the country, where you don't have to shave if you don't feel like it, people don't ask you about your work, and you can hold a thought from one day to the next.
I'm always building something, because editing is such a static process and you need to hold on to a certain momentum.
Building is great for getting the blood going.
I'm hopeless at all of this but it's a wonderful relief from the fact you've got structural problems on your film.
It's all about persistence, and doing 15 versions before finally getting the right one.
Towards the end of a project, I have big bright flashes and I realize how it will all come together, but a lot of it is just very plodding work.
Desperation is often a big factor.
You take the biggest risks when you have the least to lose.
On, Driving Me Crazy, I decided to put the making of the film into the film.
No one else had done this before, and it was the only way I could tell the story in a hopelessly out-of-control situation.
It really worked, and it opened a whole new area.
I was amazed.
Beth OrtonMusician
In an obvious way, my main inspiration is my acoustic guitar.
It's a Levin.
I found it in a second-hand store in London.
It was up on the wall, with a 300 quid sticker on it, but the guy was so attached to it he wouldn't sell it to me.
I went home, told my then-boyfriend, he went out the next day and bought it for me.
It's been this extraordinary gift that has kept on unfolding its secrets.
I wrote all the songs for Comfort of Strangers (her latest album) on it.
I think, sometimes, all the songs I've written since I got it were locked inside the guitar just waiting to come out.
It's that magical.
If I'm in a certain place, I always read Anna Akhmatova.
She's a Russian poet, and I know that makes her sound doomy and depressing, which maybe she is, but her poems always lift me up.
She elevates emotions, makes them almost sacred.
When you're in a dark place, you don't really need cheering up, do you?
You need some kind of confirmation.
I always find her a real solace and an incredible inspiration.
Inspiration can also come from seemingly trivial things, too.
Sometimes I just put on my big pink hat, and feel inspired.
It's one of those pieces of clothing that ups the ante.
When I put it on, I always feel I have to step up to the glory of the big pink hat.
Antony Hegarty
Singer, Antony and the Johnsons
What inspires me?
A room, the people and sounds that might be in it, spirits and patterns of light, the past and the future awakening in the present, nature, tides of water, and the movement of air, animals, and the ways they move, seeking greater freedom.
To me, the creative process is a refuge one hopes will always be there when you need it.
Sometimes the more obvious places are less inspiring than the cramped or inopportune ones.
I have experienced a few really great moments in the course of my life, and most of them have been connected to the creative process, either my own or someone else's.
You get a feeling all the stars are aligned and suddenly reality shifts and embraces something that feels eternal.
You look out from a moment like that, and everything is as it should be.
Even in terrible times, we are still offered that gracious gift of creativity, that possibility to transform, to dream of radical new solutions.
Cornelia Parker
Artist
Inspiration is a slippery thing.
You have to keep it in peripheral vision, pretending not to be interested, because when you are consciously looking for it, it remains infuriatingly elusive.
I'm usually walking, on the bus, mid-conversation, or in bed, when it happens.
Often, the most inspiring situations are when you are forced outside your comfort zone and made to challenge your perceptions or prejudices.
By trying to bridge the gap between your sense of reality and the one you are confronted with, rarely-used parts of the brain suddenly become activated.
Then, like a microscopic jigsaw puzzle, tiny points of stimulus accumulated over time come together in an instant, making you think you have had an idea that came from nowhere.
Will Alsop
Architect
Inspiration cannot be relied on and it certainly cannot be waited for.
Those who announce they are sitting and waiting for some imagined thunderbolt to arrive as if from nowhere are deluding themselves, and us, of their capability and talent.
Inspiration or insight, for me, comes from working.
Admittedly, this can take the form of staring at a blank page for hours, but more often it occurs because I am adding noise to the system.
Noise takes the form of making marks, often not understood, with paint, print, or anything close to hand in order to exercise the imagination.
My work does not start with logic as this can be acquired later; it comes from desire.
When there is sufficient noise in the system, I can sometimes walk through the space in a dream.
I do not believe in creativity - it sounds too close to God - but I do in inspiration.
It is a wonderful feeling and worth celebrating with a good claret.
Naomi Alderman
Novelist
Sometimes, as a writer, you will suddenly find yourself interested in something random and it's important to follow those obsessions.
Currently, I am reading a lot of memoirs about bereavement, just one after the other.
I haven't been bereaved lately.
I had a strange period, a couple of years ago, where I suddenly got very interested in treasure-hunt books.
This is how random I'm talking, and you just have to listen when something random calls to you.
I don't think all of my obsessions have, necessarily, shown themselves in what I'm doing, either, but I have faith they will, eventually.
It's wonderful when you notice something inspiring unravel before your eyes.
I remember hearing a rabbi give a sermon about this once.
Inspiration is an aspect of the divine.
You are given a gift of a flash of lightning, a moment.
The rabbi said it's as if you are walking in the dark, with no streetlights and no moon, then there's a flash of lightning and you can see the steeple of the place you are going to.
But to actually get there you still have to walk in the dark.
And all you can do is to try to keep in your mind that sudden flash on the horizon.
That's exactly what it's like.
Andrew Motion
Poet Laureate
If you suppose there is some kind of regular switch you can flick in order to inspire yourself, you're probably kidding yourself - it's less reliable and more complex.
The only reliable thing is, whatever the hell inspiration is, it's not going to happen, unless you give yourself space and accept it.
It is difficult to cultivate except by simply creating the time; you have to be patient.
Staring, oftimes, is the absolutely crucial thing for me, when you appear to be doing nothing, but you're thinking in some thoughtful way, or allowing stuff to bubble up from your deep unconscious.
I think it's very important, because you're letting associations form between apparently disparate ideas.
My writing is very ritualized; I write prose in pencil, do everything in longhand first, and I have a special kind of book I write my poems in.
I also find it very difficult to write away from home.
When I was 17, my mother had a serious accident, and eventually died; the resonances of it still continue with me very powerfully today.
It is the most significant thing that has inspired me in my life and work and has undoubtedly shaped the way I think.
Mary Midgley
Philosopher
I get excited about ideas, and I like to talk or write about them.
I don't suffer from writing blocks like a lot of people.
The example most important to me is, I got very excited about animal behavior at the time when that was first a matter of public discussion, in the 1950s.
It was a conversion moment.
Konrad Lorenz and Jane Goodall were telling us about the lives of animals, showing they were much more like our own than we had supposed.
I thought it was bloody good stuff.
I don't have to wait for ideas; things crowd in upon me.
I think people like me who mainly write about ideas and thoughts are in an easier situation than novelists.
My neighbor is a novelist, and she is quite often in despair because no stories are occurring to her.
If what you are going to be writing about are the ideas that are current in the world, they are always banging about and banging into you, so it is not a problem for me.
At present, there is possibly too much emphasis on originality; on being totally different to what has been before.
When somebody is praised for saying something absolutely new, it's a bit silly, because there are as many stupid new things to say as old ones.
I think one should be prepared to say the obvious.
Steve Reich
Composer
The more hours I put in sitting in front of the piano or the computer actually trying to compose, the more inspiration occurs.
It rarely happens, unless I'm actually hearing the sounds I am working on.
It's the sounds themselves, the chords, the harmonic progressions, that inspire me.
When I come up with a great one, the inspiration leaps out at me.
I agree with Thomas Edison: he said it's 99 per cent perspiration and 1 per cent inspiration.
Basically, if you put in the time focusing on your work, there's a chance inspiration will strike.
Emma Rice
Artistic director, Kneehigh Theatre
For me, inspiration comes from memory, or perhaps where what was mingles with what could be.
It could be the memory of a stupidly joyful children's game, or the rush of remembrance of grief, or love.
It is these moments of profound living that inform every choice I make.
My greatest moment of inspiration was when I said, 'I want to direct The Red Shoes'.
I swear, at that point, I had never seen the film, or read the story.
It had bubbled up from some folk memory or childhood telling.
I greedily found the story, and wept as I realized the wonderful and terrible significance.
The piece I made was one of the rawest and most honest things I have created.
Rebecca Lenkiewicz
Playwright
Disastrous love affairs can push you into work.
There's a chemical reaction to rejection, an adrenaline kick and a clarity that comes when you realize you are on your own, and your energies can be put into something other than the person who pushed you away.
I like watching people, and the relationships between people.
Someone could be sat on a bench in a certain way or wearing a certain thing, or a man could be whispering something in a woman's ear, and I'll want to write about it.
I like being by the sea, and working late at night, and traveling.
Laura Wade
Playwright
As a playwright, it's mostly people that inspire me, because that is the currency of theatre; writing for theatre comes out of a continuous fascination with people.
I watch everyone around me.
Sometimes you get a glimpse of a really interesting scene going on at the other side of the restaurant or on public transport.
If you've got your eyes open it's all there to be had.
I like to sit down by the Thames, on the South Bank ,where there is a constant new flow of people - you can watch for hours.
London is really inspiring, in just the way it is constructed; all the different historical periods jumbled together and everything layered on top of each other.
There are so many stories and such multiplicity.
I love wandering around the city at the weekend, when it's completely deserted.
I never write a character directly based on someone I know, because that would just be awful, and no one would ever want to be your friend.
But I have friends who have been very excited when they have seen a little snippet of something they say, or one of their little quirks turn up in a play.
My most inspired moment was when I was in the early stages of writing my play, Breathing Corpses.
It sounds really wanky, but I was sitting in the cafe, at Tate Modern, at the moment when the three strands of the story all suddenly fell into place.
Stewart Lee
Comedian/Writer
I used to carry a notebook and write down bitty ideas, but I don't now.
My last few shows have all come together in a single moment.
90s Comedian [his 2004 Edinburgh show] developed out of being accused of blasphemy by the religious right [after Jerry Springer - The Opera].
I get inspiration from jazz and improvized music.
You're listening to a person in the act of creation.
They're making choices - like at what point does John Coltrane decide to return to the main theme, and how far away can he get from it, while giving you a hint of it to keep you listening?
In stand-up, the audience has an innate understanding of what the rhythm of a joke should be, and their pleasure is the extent to which you conform or deviate from it.
How long can you go on without giving them a pay-off?
My most inspired moment came in a dream.
I woke up laughing about an idea for a safari park which had only worms in it.
I've no idea where that came from.
Akram Khan
Dancer
There are no formulas.
It never feels the same twice, and never approaches you in the same way twice.
I believe the mind and body are like a library that holds, not only your own experiences, but also those of your ancestors, and so when external forces (like watching a film, or studying a picture, or experiencing a theatre piece) are presented to you, it triggers something within the library of your memory bank and suddenly the file that is triggered opens, and the language of inspiration begins.
One of the most inspiring moments of my career was when I came across my reflection, my opposite, my balance, in my producer, Farooq Chaudhry.
The first time I met him, I remember vividly that feeling of knowing my guardian angel had arrived.
In all honesty, I cannot tell you if he is the shadow or I am.
Inspiration most often arises when I am at my most vulnerable, on my way down, creatively or emotionally.
I feel I have to get close to the doorways of failure before I can succeed.
I have to be alone, surrounded by stillness and silence.
It's not something I can control.
Maybe I see a picture, that suddenly resonates something within me, and in the result of the collision (between the external and the internal), my ancestors start to whisper to me.
Maybe the whisper, that I call 'inspiration', is actually called... 'hope'.
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